Technology

You may have seen my recent blog post about what we learned from the Skype outage. I have had much feedback about this article and I found it important enough to publish in an upcoming TMC magazine. I won’t tell you which as I would like you to read them all of course.
One of the letters I received regarding the post was actually something the author allowed me to publish. The quantity of mail I receive where the author wants me not to publish the comments is astounding actually.
The e-mail below agrees with my thoughts regarding the Skype outage and since it comes from Ixia, a testing company no one should be surprised.

Today Google announced its Google Earth program will allow you navigate stars as well. You can now see constellations and navigate around the cosmos. You can see how planets rotate using an animation tool and more. Here are some of the neat things the program will let you do:
Constellations -- From Cassiopeia to Andromeda, the Constellations layer connects the points of constellations through space, labeling each with its given name.

If you live vicariously through my travel schedule then you were with me in Arizona during that muggy and super-hot trip I took a while back to see Oaisys and learn about their Talkument voice appliance.
As you may recall, Talkument makes voicemail as useful as e-mail with the ability to annotate them or even pieces of these voice messages.
Here is a full feature list:

Highlighting — Selected segments of the voice document can be highlighted so whoever is authorized to review the file can simply listen to the pertinent segment and not have to wade through the entire file.

Commenting — An annotation feature helps the user tag certain documents for future retrieval. These comments are visible for other authorized users to facilitate collaboration and communication.

File Management System — Talkument also allows users to store the voice files in its file management system, which contains folders that can be custom-configured and personalized to make it easy to find files at a later date.

In previous posts it was mentioned that SkypeblamesMicrosoft for the recent outage it had last week. More recently Skype has issued a statement saying it does not diectly blame Microsoft for the problem but instead it clarified the Microsoft update patches caused a chain reaction which caused their network to fail.
Here are the details:

1. Are we blaming Microsoft for what happened?
We don’t blame anyone but ourselves.

TMC is proud to have partnered with SightSpeed to launch a videoconferencing channel on TMCnet which is designed to bring together the community of videoconferencing decision-makers in a single location online.
Expect this channel to be updated frequently and worth bookmarking to keep up to date on the latest in all things having to do with the videoconferencing space.
I have selected some articles from the channel you may find interesting.

The technology relies on user computers to route phone calls and handle some of the call authentication. There are thousands of computers and servers that are tapped to act as these supernodes in the Skype network.
That reliance has allowed Skype, owned by San Jose's eBay, to keep phone calls free between members and extremely cheap for calls to nonsubscribers. But an outage like last week's reveals the inherent vulnerability in the system when a large number of computers are affected within a short span of time, said Rich Tehrani, chairman of the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo and president of TMC, a communications and technology media company.
"The fate of the users is not in the control of one company, and that's the problem," Tehrani said.